Introduction to articles on sequencing
software/Cakewalk for Windows

John S. Allen

"In Cakewalk Pro Audio...[d]isk space optimization is handled for you. You can
think of audio events as independent events just like notes, and freely copy and modify
them. Cakewalk Pro Audio will do the work of conserving disk space by trying to share
storage among similar audio events. Computers are good at boring tasks like this.
Computers should do them so you don't have to."

page 247 of the Cakewalk Pro Audio v. 5.0 user's manual

That quote applies to the recently added, audio features of Cakewalk Pro Audio
sequencing software. Unfortunately, and ironically, it does not apply nearly as well to
Cakewalk's MIDI editing features -- despite Cakewalk's decade of experience in developing
MIDI sequencing software.

Cakewalk is as easy to use as a typical word processor, as long as you work only with
notes. (Well, actually there is one problem with notes -- the unison problem.) When you edit files containing
"controller" data -- and other data, for example, key, meter and tempo changes
-- you will sometimes get unexpected, unwanted and confusing results.

If you want a good introduction to MIDI editing under Cakewalk, read the manual, or go
to Betty Kainz's tutorial on the
Web. If editing doesn't work as you expected, and you can't figure out how it does work,
then read the articles on this site.

You can save a tremendous amount of time and frustration when using Cakewalk if you
know about the editing quirks -- which are not always described in detail, or at all, in
the Cakewalk documentation (clearly written as that documentation is ...) Similar problems
are endemic to commercial sequencer packages, not just to Cakewalk. A larger goal of this
series of articles is to point to these problems and their solutions.

My experiences...

I'll describe my own experience that led me to write these articles.

I had been a musician and computer user for many years when, a couple of years ago, I
bought a Pentium computer and installed Cakewalk music sequencing software. I then began
to use the computer to compose music.

In order to learn to use the software, and because I had not yet made room in my office
for a keyboard, I sketched all of the music using the mouse in Cakewalk's Staff View and
Piano Roll View. I shaped the performances using Cakewalk's Piano Roll, Controllers and
Tempo views. I was, by design and necessity, what Betty Kainz fondly calls a
"mouser."

My hope was to apply the compositional approach of sketching and refining, listening
and editing, exploring and building - the approach that all composers use. But I wanted to
apply this approach to the actual creation of music, not only to the creation of notation.

Primitive editing tools

I began using a sequencer in the hope that it would allow me to create and
edit the musical performance onscreen using the sequencer's editing tools, the same way I
created and edited my site logo of a bicycle

using Canvas for Windows, or the formatting1 of thistext
using Microsoft FrontPage. I wanted to apply the compositional approach directly to
structural elements of music - pitch, timing, dynamics, tone color -- not only notation,
and not only elements which notation can represent. I wanted to check out what I was doing
as I did it, by playing it back, and then edit again.

I found myself in some ways very gratified in the ability to do this, but in other
ways, I was left shaking my head and wondering. There is much that is entirely, obviously
possible and which cries out to be done, but which Cakewalk, and the other sequencers I
have tried, simply do not do.

The central reason for this, apparently, is that the present generation of sequencing
software is very much written by, and for, people who create music by performing it rather
than by using the tools which the software offers. To a large degree, that approach
informs all of the sequencing software packages which I have examined - and what a shame,
because the ability to edit and manipulate the musical data fluently would lead to
entirely new artistic possibilities.

The tools which music software makes available are far more primitive than today's
graphics and text editing tools. There are problems with music software that nobody would
put up with in word processing or image editing software. This is true of other music
software packages, not just Cakewalk. I use Cakewalk as my main example, since it is the
software package with which I am most familiar.

Moviemaking as an analogy for a different way of creating music

What music sequencing could do for music can be explained by an analogy with
scriptwriting, production of a play on stage, and moviemaking, as follows:

The creation of notation is to the creation of music only as the writing of
a script is to the performance of a play.

Traditionally, notation has been the medium for musical exploration. Notation has made
musical exploration possible, by preserving musical ideas so they can be reviewed, edited
and refined. But notation preserves only a script of a piece of music. Notation does not
make music, any more than a script acts out a play. The music itself must be rebuilt anew
for every performance, even for the composer's own explorations. Much of what constitutes
the musical performance is passed down through tradition and/or depends on the performer's
skill and discretion.

Using sequencing software is like creating a movie more than it is like
performing a play on the stage -- but

Two ways to make movies are by pointing a camera at actors, or by animation and special
effects. When making a movie using actors, you have more freedom in editing and staging
than when producing a play in the theater, but the result consists of images of the
actors. Animation and special effects are a more painstaking way to make a movie, but in
return for the extra work, they liberate the medium, making it possible to create entirely
new, imaginary worlds on screen.

Performing musicians are like actors. To play a piece of music, musicians rehearse it;
then they must perform it in real time, limited by what they and their instruments can
physically achieve. In a recording, you can edit together the best parts of different
performances, but you can't get beyond the limitations of what the musicians can actually
perform.

Many musicians would like to write for instruments they don't play well, and want to
create effects that are unplayable in real time on any instrument. I certainly would like
to do this. Yet today's sequencers are overwhelmingly biased toward the recording and
playback of performed music. To get back to our movie analogy, it's as if we had all the
equipment we need to make movies with actors -- cameras, lighting equipment, editing
tables -- but we hadn't developed the special-purpose stop-motion cameras, art supplies
and computer equipment that animators and special effects artists use.

Today's filmmakers have new and better tools every year, thanks to
computer technology. The music software industry has provided musicians with tools that
hardly begin to compare.

The problems with sequencing tools fall into three major
categories:

1) Problems with the data structure of the MIDI protocol itself which limit its editing
flexibility;

2) Problems which result from typical design concepts for sequencers;

3) Problems with sequencers which result from a shallow and faulty application of
musical theory.

These problems, and their solutions, are described in articles currently posted or to
be posted on this site.

I'll show you workarounds for the quirks of editing in Cakewalk, the sequencer package
I know best. While I'm at it, I'll offer you some of my vision of what I would really like
to see in a sequencer. I hope that you find this information useful.